FocusON: PPC Tips – Granularity Is The Key!

PPC is one of the founding cornerstones of Google, and all online search for that matter, so one of the key things you can do as an advertiser is get your paid ads working as hard for you as possible! As such one of the key things you can do to ring out as much efficiency from your PPC activity as possible is to ensure you employ a structure of maximum granularity.

The overarching principle of PPC is a simple one – match your products / services, which are represented through your keywords, to the people searching for them by matching the users search query to your keywords…then show them a targeted ad reflecting their search.

So by organising your ad groups into a granular structure the more reflective of the users search you can be with your ad copy. Below is an example based on a search term of “mens cheap brown brogues”…

The idea here is that you develop key tightly controlled ad groups which will have strong CTR’s and accompanying conversion rates too as they will be picking up search queries further down the search funnel and therefore due to the much greater degree of relevance should have a much higher propensity to convert.

This method will also allow you the ability to deep link specific ad group sets of keywords directly to the most appropriate page of the site…and as we know the further down the sales process we can deliver your customers then, again, the higher the likelihood of conversion.

This leads us on the next benefit of this approach which is that over time as you use your search query reports you will be able to move traffic away from arriving at your ad through a broad matched head term into exact matched long tail. As has been seen time and time again we all know that the long tail exact match terms are where we expects to see the strongest CTR’s, conversion rates and ROI’s all accompanied by lower CPC’s.

Another incidental benefit is that if clear, logical naming conventions are used in setting up all campaigns and ad groups it can make reporting on specific areas of the account much easier too.

Warning! While the additional layers of granularity can have a really positive impact on the PPC performance, it does need to be implemented carefully and well controlled. The granular nature of the account means that it would need to be tightly controlled through the use of negative match types so that whenever a long tail search term is typed in by a user then it is forced through the exact match ad group to capitalise on the lower CPC’s that can be available.

This is a relatively simple process of, whenever a new long tail exact match keyword is added to the account, that it is also added as a negative against the broad match head terms in the campaign.

It can also mean it is slower in gathering ad group levels data to lower number of clicks hitting the highly targeted one as opposed to much broader ad groups that will gain clicks much quicker…but sure the potential end result of improved efficiencies and lower costs is worth it?